There’s a workflow running inside a lot of wholesale fashion brands that nobody would ever design on purpose. We heard it described recently by an ops lead at a Scandinavian menswear brand, 70% wholesale, and it’s important because it’s not unusual. It’s the norm.
Here’s the workflow. A retail partner with a return agreement decides to send stock back. Sometimes an email arrives first, vague about contents. Often it doesn’t. What arrives is a box. Sometimes 400 pieces in it. No usable manifest, no link to an order, no warning to the warehouse.
The brand can’t raise a normal purchase order because they don’t know what’s in the box, and experience says it won’t match whatever the email claimed anyway. So they raise a dummy purchase order. One line on it. The warehouse receives the box against the dummy, fills it up with whatever physically arrived, and sends the completed fiction back to head office. Only then does anyone know what came home. A credit note gets drafted, checked against what the retailer claimed, and the two rarely agree.
And then, mostly, the brand just accepts it. Disputing a discrepancy on a seventy-dollar wholesale piece costs more in admin than the credit is worth.
The retailer knows this.
“They’re trying to save money, we’re trying to save money, but they’re bigger than us. They get the efficiency, we get the pain.”
Why this is a process smell, not a software gap
The instinct is to blame tooling, and it’s true the software market has ignored this. Five years of investment went into consumer returns portals while B2B returns, the majority of revenue at brands like this one, still runs on boxes and guesswork.
But before you go shopping, look at the process, because most of this is fixable inside the ERP and warehouse setup you already have. The dummy PO exists because the process was designed around a document (the purchase order) instead of an event (stock is coming back). Flip that and the workarounds start disappearing.
What good looks like.
RMA-first receiving.
Every inbound return gets a returns authorisation record the moment the retailer signals intent, however vaguely. The RMA is allowed to be wrong. Its job is to exist, so the warehouse receives against a real object instead of a fictional PO, and so head office has a record that predates the box.
Blind receipt as a designed workflow, not a hack.
Most WMSs support blind receiving properly. Receive what’s physically there, line by line, against the RMA, and let the system generate the discrepancy report automatically. That’s the same work the warehouse does today filling up the dummy, except the output is structured data instead of a returned fiction.
Probabilistic invoice matching.
The hard problem in wholesale returns is attribution. Stock comes back at season end, six or nine months after shipping, and the same SKU has shipped to the same retailer many times in between.
The ops lead’s image was perfect: “You shoot the beast, and it comes back nine months later, and you could have shot the same beast ten times.”
Deterministic matching is impossible, so stop demanding it. A good guess, most recent shipment of that SKU to that partner, FIFO across open invoices, whatever rule finance can live with, beats no match. Configure the rule once, apply it consistently, and reserve human attention for the exceptions.
Codify the economics of surrender.
If you already auto-accept every discrepancy below a certain value because disputing costs more, that’s not a failure, that’s a policy. Write it down, put the threshold in the system, and stop paying people to perform a dispute process whose outcome is predetermined. The dishonest version of this is what most brands do now: pretend to check everything, actually check nothing.
Triage sellable stock at receipt.
Most of what comes back in wholesale has nothing wrong with it. It’s sellable product that sat on a shop floor too long, and by the time it’s travelled back it’s aged into dead stock. The receiving workflow should route it to its next best destination, outlet, partner, clearance channel, at the moment it’s scanned, not after a quarterly stock review finds it.
The uncomfortable bit
None of this needs new software categories. It needs someone to admit the current process was never designed, it accreted, and to spend a few unglamorous weeks in the ERP and WMS configuration making the return an event the system expects rather than an ambush it survives.
The consumer side of returns got beautiful because it was customer-facing and venture-funded. The wholesale side stayed ugly because it’s internal and nobody’s demo ever shows it. If your process involves a dummy anything, that’s the tell. The system is telling you it was never asked to handle reality, and reality showed up in a box with 400 pieces in it.
If any part of this is running inside your business right now, dummy POs, unmatched credit notes, a returns process nobody designed, get in touch. This is the kind of ERP and WMS reconfiguration we do.